‘Điệp|sparkling of scallop paper’ is the debut solo exhibition from Mifa, a Da Nang-based visual artist and researcher who specialises in painting with acrylics on traditional diep paper, made from Do trees and scallop shells. 

The playfulness and peace of childhood and the terrors of modernity find a unique intersection in her work, which applies ultra-modern paint and transfer techniques to beautiful and simple folk paper. The roots of diep-paper stretch deep into her ancestor’s folklore and are reinvented anew in the imagination of the millennial female artist, living at a moment of unique trauma and disjuncture in our shared history. 

The newest series, ‘Under the scent of hidden foliage and rain’, was creating during the pandemic and showcases the delicate intimacy of Mifa’s technique, presenting simple images that resonate with the hum of nature, boundaried as if by a smart-phone screen, inspired by the changes that the pandemic brought, and that sense of being forced to look, as in the modernist frame, ‘at the familiar in an unfamiliar way’. The accompanying ‘Poetry’ series comprises paintings that speak to Mifa’s fascination, not only with visual arts, but with verse. Here the colour and cadence of discrete images combine as a whole  series in whimsical combination. As in the throng of modernity itself, Mifa’s work presents a kind of synaesthesia, where individual images interact with each other as compelling lyrical statements.

Download Exhibition Catalogue